Tim Cook Says Apple Music Has 6.5M Paying Users

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It’s been three and a half months since Apple Music launched and, with the first wave of users’ free three-month trial periods coming to a close at the end of October, Apple has given a taste of how it is faring. Company CEO Tim Cook said the service currently has 6.5 million paying users. On top of that, Cook shared that there are 8.5 million people using the free trial right now.

Back in August, Apple said that it had 11 million people on the trial, so it converted just over half of them into paid users. (More on that below.) Apple Music’s figures are some way short of Spotify’s 20 million paying customer base, but it’s not a bad effort for the new service — which isn’t yet available on Android and has no free listening option. That former is important in emerging markets, while the latter can help snare more conservative users and convert them to paying customers later.

Apple Music may be similarly vague with its big numbers, since a decent chunk of that 6.5 million may be people who forgot to cancel their free trial and involuntarily became paying members. That might sound easily avoidable but it happened to some staffers at TechCrunch. I’ll spare the names and save their embarrassment — the point is that it is very easy to become a paying Apple Music customer without necessarily meaning to be one.

BioTest Cook is Apple's CEO.
He took over from Steve Jobs on 25 August 2011. In his previous position as COO, Cook was responsible for all of the company's worldwide sales and operations, including end-to-end management of Apple's supply chain, sales activities, and service and support in all markets and countries. He also headed Apple's Macintosh division and played a key role in the continued development …